Vernon Arena, Wolgast-Rivers boxing match (ca. 1912)

Out of Susan Sontag’s The Benefactor:

I found my heart empty of personal ambition. Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. I did not come into this sort of relation, part conspiratorial and part envious, with my peers.

I don’t dream. I find intolerable the slow leakage of my substance in dreams, so I have staged my life to incorporate the energy that is usually diverted in dreaming. My writing forces from me the dream-substance, prolongs it, plays with it.

I am no artist . . . I have no inner burden which I wish to unload upon a passive audience. I do not wish to contribute one jot to the fund of public fantasy.

You have character, like an American temperance tract or the great unfinished cathedral in Barcelona.

I came to understand that words coerce the feelings they attempt to embody. Words are not the proper vehicle for a general upheaval which destroys the old accumulation of feeling.

I feared that the effort of assuming the identity of a writer might deprive her of the scant realism about herself which she possessed.

. . . sexuality, like crime, is an imperishable resource of the impersonal. Properly performed, these acts do blunt the sense of self. It is, I think, because the end is fixed: in sexuality, the orgasm; in crime, the punishment. One becomes free precisely through those acts which have an inescapable end.

An unidentified, lightweight boxer poses with one arm extended and the other drawn back, Denver, Colorado. He wears a tank shirt with leggings, laced boxing shoes, and half gloves. (ca. 1910-1920)